So, while the MSM hammers Joe the Plumber, they kiss up to Louis Farrakhan and the NOI. Given that there is just one degree of separation between Farrakhan and Obama, I guess this makes a twisted sort of sense to the left.

An open letter to the local daily paper -- almost every local daily paper in America:

I remember reading All the President's Men and thinking: That's journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know.

This housing crisis didn't come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.

It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.

What is a risky loan? It's a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.

The goal of this rule change was to help the poor -- which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can't repay? They get into a house, yes, but when they can't make the payments, they lose the house -- along with their credit rating.

They end up worse off than before.

This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.

Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me. It's as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.)

Isn't there a story here? Doesn't journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren't you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefitting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?

I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. "Housing-gate," no doubt. Or "Fannie-gate."

Instead, it was Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting subprime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed.

As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled Do Facts Matter? "Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush's Secretary of the Treasury."

These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was ... the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was ... the Republican Party.

Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!

What? It's not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?

Now let's follow the money ... right to the presidential candidate who is the number-two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae.

And after Freddie Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million while running it into the ground, was fired for his incompetence, one presidential candidate's campaign actually consulted him for advice on housing.

If that presidential candidate had been John McCain, you would have called it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in your paper every day about how incompetent and corrupt he was.

But instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this story, and when the McCain campaign dared to call Raines an "adviser" to the Obama campaign -- because that campaign had sought his advice -- you actually let Obama's people get away with accusing McCain of lying, merely because Raines wasn't listed as an official adviser to the Obama campaign.

You would never tolerate such weasely nit-picking from a Republican.

If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.

If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis.

There are precedents. Even though President Bush and his administration never said that Iraq sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not stand the fact that Americans had that misapprehension -- so you pounded us with the fact that there was no such link. (Along the way, you created the false impression that Bush had lied to them and said that there was a connection.)

If you had any principles, then surely right now, when the American people are set to blame President Bush and John McCain for a crisis they tried to prevent, and are actually shifting to approve of Barack Obama because of a crisis he helped cause, you would be laboring at least as hard to correct that false impression.

Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That's what you claim you do, when you accept people's money to buy or subscribe to your paper.

But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie -- that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain, and the Republicans. You have trained the American people to blame everything bad -- even bad weather -- on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to.

If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth -- even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.

Because that's what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don't like the probable consequences. That's what honesty means. That's how trust is earned.

Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time -- and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.

Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter -- while you ignored the story of John Edwards's own adultery for many months.

So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means?

Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?

You might want to remember the way the National Organization of Women threw away their integrity by supporting Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless women. Who listens to NOW anymore? We know they stand for nothing; they have no principles.

That's where you are right now.

It's not too late. You know that if the situation were reversed, and the truth would damage McCain and help Obama, you would be moving heaven and earth to get the true story out there.

If you want to redeem your honor, you will swallow hard and make a list of all the stories you would print if it were McCain who had been getting money from Fannie Mae, McCain whose campaign had consulted with its discredited former CEO, McCain who had voted against tightening its lending practices.

Then you will print them, even though every one of those true stories will point the finger of blame at the reckless Democratic Party, which put our nation's prosperity at risk so they could feel good about helping the poor, and lay a fair share of the blame at Obama's door.

You will also tell the truth about John McCain: that he tried, as a Senator, to do what it took to prevent this crisis. You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his administration tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a responsible way.

This was a Congress-caused crisis, beginning during the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading the way into the crisis and blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely fashion.

If you at our local daily newspaper continue to let Americans believe --and vote as if -- President Bush and the Republicans caused the crisis, then you are joining in that lie.

If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats -- including Barack Obama -- and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans -- then you are not journalists by any standard.

You're just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it's time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a daily newspaper in our city.

Gateway Pundit says he contacted the LA Times to ask about a video showing Barack Obama at a party for former PLO spokesman Rashid Khalidi, mentioned by the LA Times in this article: Allies of Palestinians see a friend in Barack Obama.

At Khalidi’s going-away party in 2003, the scholar lavished praise on Obama, telling the mostly Palestinian American crowd that the state senator deserved their help in winning a U.S. Senate seat. “You will not have a better senator under any circumstances,” Khalidi said.

The event was videotaped, and a copy of the tape was obtained by The Times.

LA Times writer Peter Wallsten said he won’t release the video or reveal his sources: Confirmed: MSM Holds Video Of Barack Obama Attending Jew-Bash & Toasting a Former PLO Operative... Refuse to Release the Video!

If true, this is media malfeasance of an almost astounding degree. They have a video that could change the stakes in this election and they’re hiding it. And they’ve been hiding it since last April.

Contact the Los Angeles Times and demand that they release this video.

UPDATE at 10/25/08 9:36:04 pm:

It gets even more interesting.

Also attending the farewell dinner described above: Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

In Chicago, the Khalidis founded the Arab American Action Network, and Mona Khalidi served as its president. A big farewell dinner was held in their honor by AAAN with a commemorative book filled with testimonials from their friends and political allies. These included the left wing anti-war group Not In My Name, the Electronic Intifada, and the ex-Weatherman domestic terrorists Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. (There were also testimonials from then-state Senator Barack Obama and the mayor of Chicago.)**So Rachel, still confident in Obama's "zionist" credentials?**

Let’s try a thought experiment. Say John McCain attended a party at which known racists and terror mongers were in attendance. Say testimonials were given, including a glowing one by McCain for the benefit of the guest of honor ... who happened to be a top apologist for terrorists. Say McCain not only gave a speech but stood by, in tacit approval and solidarity, while other racists and terror mongers gave speeches that reeked of hatred for an American ally and rationalizations of terror attacks.

Now let’s say the Los Angeles Times obtained a videotape of the party.

Question: Is there any chance — any chance — the Times would not release the tape and publish front-page story after story about the gory details, with the usual accompanying chorus of sanctimony from the oped commentariat? Is there any chance, if the Times was the least bit reluctant about publishing (remember, we’re pretending here), that the rest of the mainstream media (y’know, the guys who drove Trent Lott out of his leadership position over a birthday-party toast) would not be screaming for the release of the tape?

Do we really have to ask?

So now, let’s leave thought experiments and return to reality: Why is the Los Angeles Times sitting on a videotape of the 2003 farewell bash in Chicago at which Barack Obama lavished praise on the guest of honor, Rashid Khalidi — former mouthpiece for master terrorist Yasser Arafat?

At the time Khalidi, a PLO adviser turned University of Chicago professor, was headed east to Columbia. There he would take over the University’s Middle East-studies program (which he has since maintained as a bubbling cauldron of anti-Semitism) and assume the professorship endowed in honor of Edward Sayyid, another notorious terror apologist.

The party featured encomiums by many of Khalidi’s allies, colleagues, and friends, including Barack Obama, then an Illinois state senator, and Bill Ayers, the terrorist turned education professor. It was sponsored by the Arab American Action Network (AAAN), which had been founded by Khalidi and his wife, Mona, formerly a top English translator for Arafat’s press agency.

Is there just a teeny-weenie chance that this was an evening of Israel-bashing Obama would find very difficult to explain? Could it be that the Times, a pillar of the Obamedia, is covering for its guy?

Gateway Pundit reports that the Times has the videotape but is suppressing it.

Back in April, the Times published a gentle story about the fete. Reporter Peter Wallsten avoided, for example, any mention of the inconvenient fact that the revelers included Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, Ayers’s wife and fellow Weatherman terrorist. These self-professed revolutionary Leftists are friendly with both Obama and Khalidi — indeed, researcher Stanley Kurtz has noted that Ayers and Khalidi were “best friends.” (And — small world! — it turns out that the Obamas are extremely close to the Khalidis, who have reportedly babysat the Obama children.)

Nor did the Times report the party was thrown by AAAN. Wallsten does tell us that the AAAN received grants from the Leftist Woods Fund when Obama was on its board — but, besides understating the amount (it was $75,000, not $40,000), the Times mentions neither that Ayers was also on the Woods board at the time nor that AAAN is rabidly anti-Israel. (Though the organization regards Israel as illegitimate and has sought to justify Palestinian terrorism, Wallsten describes the AAAN as “a social service group.”)

Perhaps even more inconveniently, the Times also let slip that it had obtained a videotape of the party.

Wallsten’s story is worth excerpting at length (italics are mine):

It was a celebration of Palestinian culture — a night of music, dancing and a dash of politics. Local Arab Americans were bidding farewell to Rashid Khalidi, an internationally known scholar, critic of Israel and advocate for Palestinian rights, who was leaving town for a job in New York.

A special tribute came from Khalidi's friend and frequent dinner companion, the young state Sen. Barack Obama. Speaking to the crowd, Obama reminisced about meals prepared by Khalidi's wife, Mona, and conversations that had challenged his thinking.

His many talks with the Khalidis, Obama said, had been "consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases. . . . It's for that reason that I'm hoping that, for many years to come, we continue that conversation — a conversation that is necessary not just around Mona and Rashid's dinner table," but around "this entire world."...

[T]he warm embrace Obama gave to Khalidi, and words like those at the professor's going-away party, have left some Palestinian American leaders believing that Obama is more receptive to their viewpoint than he is willing to say.

Their belief is not drawn from Obama's speeches or campaign literature, but from comments that some say Obama made in private and from his association with the Palestinian American community in his hometown of Chicago, including his presence at events where anger at Israeli and U.S. Middle East policy was freely expressed.

At Khalidi's 2003 farewell party, for example, a young Palestinian American recited a poem accusing the Israeli government of terrorism in its treatment of Palestinians and sharply criticizing U.S. support of Israel. If Palestinians cannot secure their own land, she said, "then you will never see a day of peace."

One speaker likened "Zionist settlers on the West Bank" to Osama bin Laden, saying both had been "blinded by ideology."

Obama adopted a different tone in his comments and called for finding common ground. But his presence at such events, as he worked to build a political base in Chicago, has led some Palestinian leaders to believe that he might deal differently with the Middle East than … his opponents for the White House....

At Khalidi's going-away party in 2003, the scholar lavished praise on Obama, telling the mostly Palestinian American crowd that the state senator deserved their help in winning a U.S. Senate seat. "You will not have a better senator under any circumstances," Khalidi said.

The event was videotaped, and a copy of the tape was obtained by The Times.

Though Khalidi has seen little of Sen. Obama in recent years, Michelle Obama attended a party several months ago celebrating the marriage of the Khalidis' daughter.

In interviews with The Times, Khalidi declined to discuss specifics of private talks over the years with Obama. He did not begrudge his friend for being out of touch, or for focusing more these days on his support for Israel — a stance that Khalidi calls a requirement to win a national election in the U.S., just as wooing Chicago's large Arab American community was important for winning local elections.

So why is the Times sitting on the videotape of the Khalidi festivities? Given Obama's (preposterous) claims that he didn’t know Ayers that well and was unfamiliar with Ayers’s views, why didn't the Times report that Ayers and Dohrn were at the bash? Was it not worth mentioning the remarkable coincidence that both Obama and Ayers — the “education reform” allies who barely know each other … except to the extent they together doled out tens of millions of dollars to Leftist agitators, attacked the criminal justice system, and raved about each others books — just happen to be intimate friends of the same anti-American Israel-basher? (Despite having watched the videotape, Wallsten told Gateway Pundit he “did not know” whether Ayers was there.)

Why won’t the Times tell us what was said in the various Khalidi testimonials? On that score, Ayers and Dohrn have always had characteristically noxious views on the Israeli/Palestinian dispute. And, true to form, they have always been quite open about them. There is no reason to believe those views have ever changed. Here, for example, is what they had to say in Prairie Fire, the Weather Underground’s 1974 Communist manifesto (emphasis in original):

Palestinian independence is opposed with reactionary schemes by Jordan, completely opposed with military terror by Israel, and manipulated by the U.S. The U.S.-sponsored notion of stability and status-quo in the Mideast is an attempt to preserve U.S. imperialist control of oil, using zionist power as the cat's paw. The Mideast has become a world focus of struggles over oil resources and control of strategic sea and air routes. Yet the Palestinian struggle is at the heart of other conflicts in the Mideast. Only the Palestinians can determine the solution which reflects the aspirations of the Palestinian people. No "settlements" in the Mideast which exclude the Palestinians will resolve the conflict. Palestinian liberation will not be suppressed.

The U.S. people have been seriously deceived about the Palestinians and Israel. This calls for a campaign to educate and focus attention on the true situation: teach-ins, debates, and open clear support for Palestinian liberation; reading about the Palestinian movement—The Disinherited by Fawaz Turki, Enemy of the Sun; opposing U.S. aid to Israel. Our silence or acceptance of pro-zionist policy is a form of complicity with U.S.-backed aggression and terror, and a betrayal of internationalism.

SELF-DETERMINATION FOR THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE!

U.S. OUT OF THE MIDEAST!

END AID TO ISRAEL!

Barack Obama wouldn’t possibly let something like that pass without a spirited defense of the Israel he tells us he so staunchly supports … would he? I guess to answer that question, we’d have to know what was on the tape.

But who has time for such trifles? After all, isn’t Diana Vreeland about to critique Sarah Palin’s sartorial splendor?

— National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy chairs the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies’s Center for Law & Counterterrorism and is the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books 2008).

Is it a coincidence that the only Jews BO has associated with are US hating liberals/radicals?

The answer cannot be no.

I would like to put Sarah Silverman on the front lines between Israel and Hamas and Hezbellah and ask her to put her life on the line by trusting a person (BO) who has historically spent his entire adult life hanging out with haters of our country and Jews.

Oh I guess that little twirp is wiser than her grandparents who lived through the holocaust - yes?

Well again I guess we can only hope BO really is the second coming of Lincoln - only time will tell.

It is an interesting, albeit long, detailed poll/study published a few days ago, but it clearly shows Jews favorObama by nearly a 2:1 margin. Anotherwords CCP, an overwhelming majority of Jews in America associate themselves with and prefer Obama and the Democratic party versus McCain or the Republicans.

JDN,Yes but this is not news.Jews have for decades been overwhemingly Democratic.I've posted before that for many Jews the Republicans are as evil as Hitler.So what is your point?

Many older Jews in Florida reportedly are afraid of BO.That is where this Sarah Silverman comes in and is doing the (for me) embarassing "great schlep" to Florida thing.

And actually a almost 2 to one margin is less than 66 percent which is less than the historical 75% of Jews who vote Democratic.So actually the number you pose is actually a *drop* for Democrats among Jewish voters.

Getting most Jews to vote Republican would be as difficult as getting most Blacks to do that.

I guess they either believe BO will protect Jews or want to believe or don't care since he is from their party. I don't know that BO will not do this but I am highly suspicious and would not risk the survival of Israel to a PResident who has apparantly had roomates and friends who are very much against Israel as has been his spiritual mentor WRight. I think it reasonable to assume he must have had some agreement with them on this regard. While there may be scant evidence for this there is absolutely zero evidence he disagreed with the anti Israel people until he was way into his campaign and the Jews around him convinced him he must do so for Jewish votes.

Remember how he will distance him from his friend and mentor of decades REv Wright. What makes anyone think he wouldn't do the same to Jews if political puch comes to shove? Just thinking out loud.

Politico political editor Charles Mahtesian was e-mailing the other day with a Republican lobbyist who signed off with a plea that sounded more like a taunt: “Keep it balanced.”

A reader e-mailed us with the same sentiment in different language. “Are you f***ing joking! Your bias has stooped to an all-time low. Wait, it will probably get worse as election day nears.” Those asterisks, by the way, are hers, not ours.

And get a load of this one, from someone in Rochester, N.Y., who did not like our analysis of the final presidential debate. “You guys are awfully tough on McCain. There may be some legitimacy to the claim of press bias. Mom.”

We were all set to dismiss Harris’ mother as a crank. Same for VandeHei’s: a conservative dismayed by what she sees as kid-glove treatment of Barack Obama. Then along came a study — funded by the prestigious Pew Research Center, no less — suggesting at first blush, at least, that they may be on to something.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism’s researchers found that John McCain, over the six weeks since the Republican convention, got four times as many negative stories as positive ones. The study found six out of 10 McCain stories were negative.

What’s more, Obama had more than twice as many positive stories (36 percent) as McCain — and just half the percentage of negative (29 percent).

OK, let’s just get this over with: Yes, in the closing weeks of this election, John McCain and Sarah Palin are getting hosed in the press, and at Politico.

And, yes, based on a combined 35 years in the news business we’d take an educated guess — nothing so scientific as a Pew study — that Obama will win the votes of probably 80 percent or more of journalists covering the 2008 election. Most political journalists we know are centrists — instinctually skeptical of ideological zealotry — but with at least a mild liberal tilt to their thinking, particularly on social issues.

So what?

Before answering the question, indulge us in noting that the subject of ideological bias in the news media is a drag. The people who care about it typically come at the issue with scalding biases of their own. Any statement journalists make on the subject can and will be used against them. So the incentive is to make bland and guarded statements. Even honest ones, meanwhile, will tend to strike partisans as evasive or self-delusional.

Here goes anyway.

There have been moments in the general election when the one-sidedness of our site — when nearly every story was some variation on how poorly McCain was doing or how well Barack Obama was faring — has made us cringe.

As it happens, McCain’s campaign is going quite poorly and Obama’s is going well. Imposing artificial balance on this reality would be a bias of its own.

Politico was not included in the Pew study. But our researcher Alex Burns pulled out his highlighter pen and did his own study of Politico's October stories last week: 110 stories advanced a narrative that was more favorable to Obama than McCain. Sixty-nine did the opposite.

Our daily parlor game (which some readers, alas, seem to take a bit more solemnly than we do) declaring “who won the day” has awarded the day to Obama by a 2-to-1 margin. It’s doubtful even McCain would say he’s had more good days than that.

Still, journalists should do more than just amplify existing trends. A couple weeks back, Politico managing editor Bill Nichols sent out a note to the campaign team urging people to cough up more story ideas that took a skeptical look at the campaign tactics and policy proposals of the Democrat, who is likely to be president three months from now. As it happened, the response was a trickle (though Nichols and Mahtesian came up with some ideas of their own).

Responsible editors would be foolish not to ask themselves the bias question, especially in the closing days of an election.

But, having asked it, our sincere answer is that of the factors driving coverage of this election — and making it less enjoyable for McCain to read his daily clip file than for Obama — ideological favoritism ranks virtually nil.

The main reason is that for most journalists, professional obligations trump personal preferences. Most political reporters (investigative journalists tend to have a different psychological makeup) are temperamentally inclined to see multiple sides of a story, and being detached from their own opinions comes relatively easy.

Reporters obsess about personalities and process, about whose staff are jerks or whether they seem like decent folks, about who has a great stump speech or is funnier in person than they come off in public, about whether Michigan is in play or off the table. This is the flip side of the fact of how much we care about the horse race — we don’t care that much about our own opinions of which candidate would do more for world peace or tax cuts.

If that causes skeptics to scoff, perhaps they would find it more satisfying to hear that the reason ideological bias matters so little is that other biases matter so much more.

This is true in any election year. But the 2008 election has had some unique — and personal — phenomena.

One is McCain backlash. The Republican once was the best evidence of how little ideology matters. Even during his “maverick” days, McCain was a consistent social conservative, with views on abortion and other cultural issues that would have been odds with those of most reporters we know. Yet he won swooning coverage for a decade from reporters who liked his accessibility and iconoclasm and supposed commitment to clean politics.

Now he is paying. McCain’s decision to limit media access and align himself with the GOP conservative base was an entirely routine, strategic move for a presidential candidate. But much of the coverage has portrayed this as though it were an unconscionable sellout.

Since then the media often presumes bad faith on McCain’s part. The best evidence of this has been the intense focus on the negative nature of his ads, when it is clear Obama has been similarly negative in spots he airs on radio and in swing states.

It is not our impression that many reporters are rooting for Obama personally. To the contrary, most colleagues on the trail we’ve spoken with seem to find him a distant and undefined figure. But he has benefited from the idea that negative attacks that in a normal campaign would be commonplace in this year would carry an out-of-bounds racial subtext. That’s why Obama’s long association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was basically a nonissue in the general election.

Journalists’ hair-trigger racial sensitivity may have been misplaced, but it was not driven by an ideological tilt.

In addition, Obama has benefited from his ability to minimize internal drama and maximize secrecy — and thus to starve feed the press’ bias for palace intrigue. In this sense, his campaign bears resemblance to the two run by George W. Bush.

Beyond the particular circumstances of McCain v. Obama, there are other factors in any race that almost always matter more than the personal views of reporters.

The strongest of these is the bias in favor of momentum. A candidate who is perceived to be doing well tends to get even more positive coverage (about his or her big crowds or the latest favorable polls or whatever). And a candidate who is perceived to be doing poorly tends to have all events viewed through this prism.

Not coincidentally, this is a bias shared by most of our sources. This is why the bulk of negative stories about McCain are not about his ideology or policy plans — they are about intrigue and turmoil. Think back to the past week of coverage on Politico and elsewhere: Coverage has been dominated by Sarah Palin’s $150,000 handbags and glad rags, by finger-pointing in the McCain camp, and by apparent tensions between the candidate and his running mate.

These stories are driven by the flood of Republicans inside and out of the campaign eager to make themselves look good or others look bad. This always happens when a campaign starts to tank. Indeed, there was a spate of such stories when Obama’s campaign hit turmoil after the GOP convention and the Palin surge.

For better or worse, the most common media instincts all have countervailing pressures. Countering the bias in favor of momentum is the bias against boredom. We’ve seen that several times this cycle — an outlying poll number being pumped to suggest big changes in a race that is basically unchanged. There’s a good chance you’ll see this phenomenon more in the next week.

Then there is the bend-over-backward bias. This is when journalists try so hard to avoid accusations of favoritism that it clouds critical judgment. A good example were stories suggesting Palin held her own or even won her debate against Joe Biden when it seemed obvious she was simply invoking whatever talking points she had at hand, hanging on for dear life.

Finally, one of the biases of journalists is the same one that is potent for almost all people: the one in favor of self-defensiveness. That’s why, even though we think ideological bias is pretty low on the list of journalistic maladies in this election, it is not viable for reporters to dismiss criticism out of hand.

Is it a coincidence that the only Jews BO has associated with are US hating liberals/radicals?

The answer cannot be no.

I would like to put Sarah Silverman on the front lines between Israel and Hamas and Hezbellah and ask her to put her life on the line by trusting a person (BO) who has historically spent his entire adult life hanging out with haters of our country and Jews.

Oh I guess that little twirp is wiser than her grandparents who lived through the holocaust - yes?

My point CCP was/is that rather than the ONLY Jews BO has associated with are US hating liberals/radicals as you put it, I think you are wrong, in truth an overwhelming majority of all Jews associate with Obama. Or are you saying in your logic that all Jews who support Obama hate the United States? I believe most Jews love America and an overwhelming majority of Jews support Obama as being best for America.

As for historical margins, this same report goes on to point out "that as of this writing (10.20.08) we would project a 75% - 25% margin in favor of Obama among Jewish voters." This despite significant changes among the demographics of Jewish voters since Rooselvelt's time favoring the Republican party.

I don't think it is "reasonable to assume (that Obama would risk the survival of Israel) he must have had some agreement with "them" on this regard." Proof And, I think the vast majority of Jewish voters are intelligent and conscientious. They will vote for someone whom they think is good for America, good for Jews in America, and good for Israel. And they are overwhelmingly choosing Obama over McCain.

Well I meant early on it seems the Jews BO had associated with appear to be "radicals" or far left and simply all those who now support him among the larger overall Jewish community.

" I think the vast majority of Jewish voters are intelligent and conscientious."

Yes, but I believe you underestimate many Jew's hatred for all things Republican.

As a Jew who is familiar with the very ardent party affiliation of most Jews and their total hatred for anything Repbublican you overestimate their willingness or even emotional ability to cross over to the Republican side. If it helps you understand what I mean try to consider the absolute visceral hatred some Blacks have for Republicans. Many Jews are the same in this regard. They *will not* open up in this way. They will put misgivings aside to vote for a guy who is now saying things he has never said to vote party lines.

And no I am not saying Jews who support BO hate the US. But I have not been made aware of Jews of the political center or the right who he has associated with prior to late in his campaign. But I have not studied his life history so I could be wrong as to this point.

I am in the minority among my fellow Jews as for my leanings to the right. Maybe I am like Jackie Mason.

SB post from Politico?: "...for most journalists, professional obligations trump personal preferences. Most political reporters (investigative journalists tend to have a different psychological makeup) are temperamentally inclined to see multiple sides of a story, and being detached from their own opinions comes relatively easy.

Joking, right??? The main media MISSED nearly all the negative stories and contradictions within the Obama campaign and picked up just a few of them belatedly. How do they know the polls tell the story if the polls are based on what people read and see through biased coverage. Was it published ANYWHERE in the mainstream media how much of the drivel from Biden in his debate was false - off by 2000% on his repeated Iraq-Afghanistan cost comparison. "Let me repeat that" Off By 2000%! Or do we mostly hear that someone spent too much on new clothes for Palin. Where is Obama pounded now for LYING about campaign spending limits, a 3/4 of a BILLION DOLLAR mistake that buys the White House - mostly silence, but the NY Times ran hit piece on Mrs. McCain and another time on some alleged Sen. McCain sex scandal that never turned into anything. Meanwhile they missed by a year what others carried on the "GOD DAMN AMERICA" pastor disaster. Was Obama or Biden EVER called on the carpet for use of the false stat that America only has 3% of the world's oil reserves when they only count as reserves the areas where congress already allows drilling? Or that tax increases must be delayed because they will admittedly choke out growth? If they choke out growth why are they good for us later? There's a question not likely to be asked by Katie Couric or Charles Gibson.

I don't know a msm-only reading liberal who even knows that Tony Rezko (convicted felon) owns the Obama's side yard or that ACORN is a leftist political group that was channeled hundreds of thousands of foundation and taxpayer funds through Obama. I've heard maybe a hundred times, even from McCain himself, of his low finish in school, but never that the Magna Cum Laude candidate picked the bumbling Joe Biden from the bottom 11% of his class.

Did you see Gibson's interview with Obama June 4 after clinching the nomination: http://abcnews.go.com/WN/story?id=5000184&page=1 "I'm curious about your feelings last night. It was an historic moment. Has it sunk in yet?" :What did she say?" "do you say to yourself: Son of a gun, I've done this?" "did you truly, in your gut, think that a black man could win the nomination of a major party to be president of the United States?" "Is the hardest part of all this behind you or ahead of you?" "Has the joyfulness of this hit home yet? Do you take joy from it?"... Compare the tone with the grilling of Palin. Maybe I just don't understand professional detachment.

I think the article makes some good points. Are reporters biased? Yes. Have they been more biased towards Obama? Yes. The media is going with their perceived money man 'cuz he's pulling in the readers and viewers. It ain't right, but that the way it goes sometimes. And it's not going to change now, or in the forseeable future.

It has become increasingly apparent that the majority of American public just doesn't care about Obama's past. Period. Do I care who Obama knows and what shady stuff he does? You betcha. But most people don't. Think about it, had a politician with ties to a former radical, crazy business investments, and links to questionable voting run for office in '00 or '04 he wouldn't have lasted through primary season.

And that's not a matter of polls or biased news. It's a matter of people freaking out about their jobs, the economy, two wars. I think many people are thinking "I don't care if the guy has two heads at this point, we just want something different." Not better, not safer, not proven, just plain different. I see people's approach to this election (unless you are a die-hard party liner) like a roll of the dice. "Screw it, I'll go with the new guy.", they're saying. And the media is going along with it 'cuz they can and no one will tell them any differently. Don't like how we report? Fine, watch/read something else.

Fortunately for me, I actually read news from both sides. And I see bias on both sides. And I can base my decisions on my own research. I wish more people would. But I'm guessing a lot of politicians and pundits would be out of jobs if this was the case.

But really, what do you expect from news these days? Conservatives play to their audience, Liberals to theirs. Everyone one screams bias, and then attempts to force their bias onto the public, all the while acting like the victim.

The argument from conservatives is always that the public are sheep and are being force fed information by the liberal media. "There is no outlet for conservative viewpoints!" is the cry heard over and over. Bullsh*t. The "mainstream media" argument became ridiculous years ago. Rush, Hannity, O'Reilly consistently hold larger market shares than their competitors, as does Fox News. They are officially mainstream now. And reaching huge audiences.

The argument from liberals is always that the public are being propagandized by the right instead of being told "the truth". Who's truth? Ultra liberal leanings by newspapers and newscasts are hardly truthworthy. Making every conservative out to be a war hungry, gun toting, christian evangelical, uneducated racist isn't the way to make friends. And it sure ain't objective.

I for one, appreciate hearing all sides of the argument, but only when presented in an intelligent, objective way. The rantings of the right turn me off, as do the pandering and whining of the left. And yelling louder (on either side) doesn't make you right, it just makes you seem like an a-hole. I consistently listen to conservative talk radio, and read conservative websites and blogs, just as I read independent, liberal, and sometimes crazy conspiracy websites and blogs. Why? Because it is the ONLY way to get a plethora of perspectives and formulate MY OWN OPINION.

Such a shame that this country has turned into "Think my way or your not worth listening to." This election season has managed to lower the discussion to a base "I right. You're wrong.", which is just plain stupid. No concession to others' arguments and certainly no common middle ground. Truly unfortunate.

"Or do we mostly hear that someone spent too much on new clothes for Palin"

I had to wonder if anyone ever question how much Hilary spends on clothes, jewelry, and make up artists.

Every single time I saw her she wears different top of the line pants outfits.

I am not clear if she ever wore the same carefully chosen outfits twice. One can only imagine the team of fashion consultants she paid off. Trying to look like the Presidents of old with her fluffy collars and all. But that is fine. No one made and issue of it and neither did I. It is just the hypocrisy and hatred of Palen by the lefty media that is not.

Not that I care one way or another about the clothes, bigger issues exist, but Hillary and Obama pay for their own clothes;they are not asking the DNC to pay for them. In contrast, $150,000 in political donations paid for Palin's wardrobe.I think that is the issue. Wrong or right; I don't know.

Regarding Palin's clothes, I agree it's a PR gaffe, but in context - she had already been ridiculed by the east coast critics for lacking good fashions, not to mention that 2 wars are going on and the world economy is in panic. GM, interesting comparison, will greek-column-gate get 35 times the scrutiny? I guess not.

SBMig, nice post. We agree on a lot of it. I agree the politico piece was a nice addition to the discussion which can get one sided here, especially in the bias thread . It's very true that there are plenty of outlets for conservatives - Rush, Hannity, Hugh Hewitt, blogs like Powerline. The conservative sites have huge followings and fill a void but I wish people would get at least a summary of another view from the mainstream.

In the realm of opinion, there are obviously conservative voices out there. As far as the Mainstream Media that's supposedly filled with objective and professional journalists, is anyone seriously going to try to argue that they don't have a hard left bias?

To paraphrase Queen Elizabeth II, 2008 is not a year on which honest journalists shall look back with undiluted pleasure. This has turned out to be even more of an annus horribilis than 2004, when Dan Rather’s fake Bush/National Guard memo fiasco redefined the “BS” in CBS News. There were so many mainstream journalists swimming in the Democratic tank this year, the nation’s newsrooms looked more like overcrowded aquariums at PetSmart.

In less than a week, the campaign season will be over. But the Obamedia’s most shameful biases and notorious blunders shall not be forgotten. Here are my Top Five, by no means comprehensive and in no particular order:

Wallsten reported that the “event was videotaped, and a copy of the tape was obtained by The Times.” But the news organization refuses to let readers watch the video of Obama and his left-wing terrorist friends and will not release the tape. It’s “old news” now.

The paper had no problem, however, embedding a video clip of Sarah Palin’s 1984 swimsuit pageant on its gossip blog and deeming it newsworthy.

2. Ogling Obama. In May, CNN posted “breaking news video” of female journalists on Obama’s press plane fawning over the Democratic presidential candidate as he talked on his cell phone. The caption listed on the network’s website: “Obama in jeans: Sen. Barack Obama surprises the press corps by wearing jeans.”

In the clip, several members of the press corps yell at a Secret Service agent to “sit down” because she’s obstructing the view of their beloved Obama. They giggle and sigh as Obama straddles over a row of seats and they furiously click away on their cameras. “You’re killing us,” one of them says breathlessly.

No, you’re killing yourselves.

Runners-up for Most Drool-Covered Groupies: The journalist who squealed “He touched me!” at the UNITY minority journalists’ convention in July; the MSNBC producer who broke down and shed tears of joy upon learning that The One had clinched the Democratic presidential nomination; MSNBC host Chris Matthews, who proclaimed that he “felt a thrill up his leg” after an Obama speech in February; Oprah Winfrey, who confessed she did a “happy dance” for Obama; and the writer for the German publication Bild, who worked out with Obama at the Ritz-Carlton in Berlin and reported: “I put my arm around his hip — wow, he didn’t even sweat! WHAT A MAN!”

3. The Atlantic Monthly’s deranged photographer. Publisher David Bradley’s once-esteemed magazine hired celebrity lens-woman Jill Greenberg to snap portraits of John McCain. Greenberg, an outspoken left-winger who goaded children into crying on film and captioned the images with anti-Bush slogans, sabotaged the photo shoot and gloated about it on a photo industry website.

After tricking McCain into standing over a strobe light to create ugly shadows on his face, she then posted vandalized versions of the imagery on her personal website with crude, vulgar labels. One featured McCain with fangs and blood dripping from his mouth — with the Greenberg-added words, “I am a bloodthirsty warmongerer (sic).” Another piece of her “art” showed an ape (a favorite Greenberg subject) defecating on McCain’s head. The highly respected editors at Atlantic professed shock despite Greenberg’s notoriety. The name of her blog: “Manipulator.”

4. The quote doctors and math-manglers at CNN.

In a botched attack on Sarah Palin, CNN reporter Drew Griffin cited National Review writer Byron York allegedly questioning Palin’s abilities and character: “The National Review had a story saying that, you know, I can’t tell if Sarah Palin is incompetent, stupid, unqualified, corrupt, or all of the above.” York, however, was characterizing the press coverage of Palin.

In a botched tally, CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien proclaimed that an audience poll showed “overwhelming” preference for Joe Biden after the vice-presidential debate. A freeze frame of the show of hands, however, showed the audience split. The mathematically challenged O’Brien also claimed that Palin slashed Alaska’s special-needs budget by 62 percent (which she recycled from the liberal Daily Kos blog), despite the fact that the governor increased special needs funding by 12 percent. Facts, schmacts.

5. Us magazine publisher Jann Wenner’s Obama apparatchiks. The gossip mag’s partisan slime job on Palin and her family (“Babies, lies, and scandal”) last September opened the floodgates of Palin-bashing across the mainstream media and was the nadir of the year. Wenner — a prominent Obama backer who ran countless hagiographies of him in sister publication Rolling Stone and featured the Obamas with the slavering headline “Why Barack Loves Her” on Us nagazine’s June cover — had his media flack e-mail the anti-Palin hit piece to all media in St. Paul for the Republican National Convention: “Might be useful as an illustration of how the news is playing out,” the flack wrote.

Indeed, the side-by-side covers of the Palin smears and the Obamas’ deification perfectly illustrate the year in Obamedia.

I’m no cheerleader for The Los Angeles Times and I’d like to see their videotape of Barack Obama praising a PLO activist as much as the next guy, but as far as I can tell, the newspaper is on firm journalistic ground in refusing to make the tape public.

To me, it’s pretty simple. Reporter Peter Wallsten made an agreement with a source to refrain from publicly disclosing the tape. Unless that source lets Wallsten off the hook, the reporter is journalistically bound to abide by the agreement, regardless of how much heat his newspaper takes from pundits on TV.

Indeed, Wallsten has little choice in the matter. If he were to cave in to mounting public demands for the tape, no self-respecting source would ever give him another shred of information. Nor should they.

Some critics have questioned why Wallsten would agree to withhold the videotape, which purportedly shows Obama with Rashid Khalidi and other Palestinians who expressed criticism of U.S. and Israeli policies. These critics note that Wallsten was allowed to describe the gathering –- a going-away party for Khalidi — in his story, so why can’t he release the tape in full?

This aspect of the debate, while perhaps interesting, is nonetheless irrelevant. Again, a deal is a deal, even if it’s a dumb deal. Besides, there may be a perfectly legitimate reason for withholding the tape, such as the possibility that it contains footage that would compromise the unnamed source’s identity.

Conspiracy theorists now point to the fact that Wallsten’s story, which was published back in April, contained no explanation about the agreement to withhold the tape from public disclosure. The only explanation of any sort, they note, was this cryptic line: “The event was videotaped, and a copy of the tape was obtained by the Times.”

But journalistically speaking, there was no compelling reason for The Times to disclose the particulars of the agreement its reporter had reached with the source. Besides, there was no way of knowing months in advance that the story would become a political football in these final days of the campaign.

Still, other critics have complained that an initial statement released by The Times earlier this week did not mention its agreement with the source. But that does not mean such an agreement did not exist. Unless we have evidence to the contrary, I’m afraid we have to take The Times at its word when it says, however belatedly, that such an agreement indeed existed.

Democratic strategist Howard Wolfson told me today that Republican presidential candidate John McCain was wasting his time attacking the newspaper for not releasing the tape. Wolfson noted that McCain would be better off, at least politically, demanding that Obama, his Democratic opponent, call for the tape’s release.

The Los Angeles Times’s Strange Notion of Journalistic EthicsGive us the tape … or at least a transcript of Obama’s radical shindig.

By Andrew C. McCarthy

Journalistic ethics?

When it comes to insulting our collective intelligence, the Obamedia soundtrack of the ongoing campaign breaks new ground on a daily, indeed an hourly, basis. Still, the Los Angeles Times takes the cake.

Change you can believe in is a short hop from fairy tales you can be sold. In that spirit, the Times tells us, we’d really, really love to release the videotape we’re holding of that 2003 Khalidi shindig — the one where Barack Obama joined a motley collection of Israel-bashers, including the former terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, to sing the praises of Rashid Khalidi — former mouthpiece for PLO master-terrorist Yasser Arafat. But alas, our hands are tied by journalistic ethics.

Of course the ever ethical Times would never try to skew election coverage in favor of a candidate it has recently endorsed (after blowing kisses at him for two years). Nor would the newspaper give its readers anything but a complete, accurate, and truthful account of an event like the Khalidi Bash that it deemed worthy enough to cover. You can take that to the bank. But, gosh-darn, it turns out that a “source” the Times won’t name supposedly provided reporter Peter Wallsten with the videotape on the solemn promise that the paper would never let it see the light of day … except to report on it as the Times saw fit.

If you believe that one, I’ve got a tax cut for you.

Let’s suspend disbelief for a moment. Let’s pretend that there is really some sentient being out there who actually leaks a videotape to a reporter wanting and expecting the event depicted to be given news coverage but somehow not wanting or expecting the tape itself to be published. And let’s further pretend that this phantom source who doesn’t want to tape disclosed nevertheless gives the tape to the newspaper rather than keeping control over it himself.

Let’s say we buy that this highly unlikely scenario actually happened. That would still not prevent the Los Angeles Times from putting out a transcript of the Khalidi testimonials and other speechifying.

We know, for example, that Barack Obama spoke for several minutes. Yet the Times has provided us with only the most cursory summary — to be more precise, not a summary but an account. A summary is a synopsis that fairly reflects what was said. Reporter Wallsten, to the contrary, fleetingly tells us only that “Obama adopted a different tone [from rabid anti-Israel speakers] in his comments and called for finding common ground.”

How so? We’re not told. Here’s the entirety of the Times description of Obama’s remarks:

His many talks with the Khalidis, Obama said, had been “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases. . . . It’s for that reason that I'm hoping that, for many years to come, we continue that conversation — a conversation that is necessary not just around Mona and Rashid's dinner table,” but around “this entire world.”

How very enlightening. What were the topics of the dinner-table talk? What blind spots and biases was Obama referring to? Did anything in his speech provide clues? We have no idea: the Times doesn’t tell us.

Moreover, we also know that several speakers that night sang paeans to Khalidi — who regards the establishment of a Jewish state in “Palestine” as the Nakba (i.e., “The Catastrophe”) and justifies terrorist attacks against Israeli military and government targets. The Times concedes the party was a forum “where anger at Israeli and U.S. Middle East policy was freely expressed.” Yet, again, we are given only two blurbs:

[A] young Palestinian American recited a poem accusing the Israeli government of terrorism in its treatment of Palestinians and sharply criticizing U.S. support of Israel. If Palestinians cannot secure their own land, she said, “then you will never see a day of peace.” One speaker likened “Zionist settlers on the West Bank” to Osama bin Laden, saying both had been “blinded by ideology.”

You know there was a lot more where that came from, spouted by several other speakers whom the Times story fails to name. Why not put out a transcript of what was said and by whom? And if the Times has information about what was in the commemorative book that was prepared for the occasion of Khalidi’s triumphant departure to assume the Edward Said chair at Columbia University, why not put that out too?

Even if you accept for argument’s sake the bunk about honoring the “source’s” supposed wishes, the newspaper wouldn’t need to release the tape in order to give us a more comprehensive account of what happened that evening. So it’s not that the Times is simply withholding the tape. The Times is trying to suppress the story. Not the story as Wallsten spun it back in April. The full story.

The full story couldn’t be more relevant. Barack Obama says he is a staunch supporter of Israel. The importance of the Khalidi festivities isn’t simply that Obama lavished praise on a man who was an Arafat apologist — although that is troubling in itself. What also matters is that many speakers (no doubt including Obama’s good friend Khalidi himself) said extremely provocative things about Israel and American policy.

While that went on, Obama apparently sat there in tacit acceptance, if not approval. He didn’t get up to leave. He wasn’t roused to a defense of his country. He didn’t deliver a spirited condemnation of Islamic terror. He just sat there. And when it came his turn to speak, he spoke … glowingly … about Khalidi. He was clearly comfortable around the agitators and, equally crucial, they were clearly comfortable spewing their bile in front of him — confident that they were certainly not giving offense.

Why would the Times think it’s not newsworthy to tell us in detail what Obama sat through and chose not to refute? He says he supports Israel, but shouldn’t we get a peek at what he actually does when Israel is under attack. After all, he wants to be in charge and soon the attacks may be more than just verbal.

All of that could be made known by the publication of a transcript, without breaching any purported promise to the purported source.

But, the Times sputters, we’ve already done that news story back in April. The material facts have already been publicized thanks to our crack reporting.

Really?

Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn were at the party. Given the controversy over their extensive relationship with Obama — sitting on boards together, doling out millions of dollars together, lauding each other’s writings, joint appearances at conferences, Obama’s introduction to Chicago politics in the Ayers/Dohrn home, etc. — didn’t the Times think their attendance together at a party for Khalidi was worth reporting?

Given that Obama now preposterously claims he and Ayers barely know each other, didn’t the Times think it was worth mentioning that guest-of-honor Khalidi, a very close friend of Obama, just happens also to be a very close friend of Ayers?

No.

The party was sponsored by the Arab American Action Network (AAAN) — an organization founded by Khalidi and his wife (who also worked for the PLO’s press agency) and lavishly funded by Obama and Ayers when they sat together on the board of the Woods Fund. Did the Times think that was newsworthy?

Again, apparently not. Wallsten’s article does not mention the AAAN’s role in the party. He describes the AAAN “a social service group” which is headed by Khalidi’s wife and was given a $40,000 grant by the Woods Fund when Obama sat on the board. In fact, AAAN is an activist Palestinian organization that regards Israel as illegitimate and supports driver’s licenses and welfare benefits for illegal aliens. Further, it was founded by both Khalidi and his wife, it actually received almost twice as much Woods Fund support as the Times said (i.e., $75,000, not $40,000), and, at the time of those grants, one of Obama’s partners on the board was Bill Ayers.

Besides Obama and Khalidi (about whose speeches the Times tells us precious little), who else spoke at the party? What was said? What was written in the commemorative book prepared for the occasion? The Times doesn’t tell us.

In fact, though the Times’s story runs 2000 words, very little of it is about the party the Times now contends it covered adequately. Most of it is dedicated to probing what Wallsten frames as the alluring mystery of Barack Obama’s position on the Israeli/Palestinian dispute. Is he really a strong Israel supporter? Do anti-Israeli Palestinians really have good reason to regard him as a friend? Would he shift away from the strong U.S. alliance with Israel to a more “even-handed” approach—as one Chicago Palestinian-rights activist claims to have heard Obama say he favored (Obama denies it)?

We don’t know. The Times raises these and other questions, acknowledges that they are vexing, but then withholds from us critical information by which we might draw our own informed conclusions.

The mainstream press, of course, is urging Congress to enact a “shield law,” protecting reporters from government subpoenas. To a former prosecutor, that’s worth noting. You see, in matters of great public importance, prosecutors have ethical obligations, too. One of them says that if you provide an incomplete or misleading version of an event to the public’s courts, and you have information in your file that would clarify the situation, you are duty-bound to disclose that information. That way, the factfinder is equipped to make an intelligent, informed decision about what the truth is.

By contrast, the mainstream media want the right to mislead you, to provide you with a woefully incomplete record, but to deprive you of clarifying information even when it is readily at their disposal. You just have to take their word for what happened, and never you mind the details.

Are you comfortable taking the Obamedia’s word for it? Or do you think you ought to have a look at what Los Angeles Times has unilaterally decided not to show you?

The time for a newspaper to start worrying about journalistic ethics is when it publishes the story, not six months later when, in the stretch run of a crucial election, it gets called on an obviously incomplete report. Ethics, furthermore, are about fair and honest treatment. If the videotape at issue involved John McCain rubbing elbows with radicals or the CIA trying to protect national defense secrets, the Times would publish it and revel in the inevitable Pulitzer for its “courage” in doing so.

Let’s see the tape … or at least a transcript.

— National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy chairs the FDD’s Center for Law & Counterterrorism and is the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books 2008).

***Not that I care one way or another about the clothes, bigger issues exist, but Hillary and Obama pay for their own clothes;they are not asking the DNC to pay for them. In contrast, $150,000 in political donations paid for Palin's wardrobe.***

Do you really think that distinction if true is the issue?

It was really all about humiliating and embarrasing Palin. Besides Hillary and co. had 100 million from years of people throwing money to them along with their political aspirations. Palin doesn't have that kind of money - at least yet.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., did a live interview with Radio Mambi in Miami this morning in which he went after Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., for his connections to a “PLO spokesman.”

McCain was referring to Rashid Khalidi, who, five years ago, Obama toasted at a going-away party before Khalidi headed off to New York City to become a professor at Columbia University.

In April, the Los Angeles Times’s Peter Wallsten wrote about the toast, saying a “special tribute came from Khalidi's friend and frequent dinner companion, the young state Sen. Barack Obama. Speaking to the crowd, Obama reminisced about meals prepared by Khalidi's wife, Mona, and conversations that had challenged his thinking.

“His many talks with the Khalidis, Obama said, had been ‘consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases...It's for that reason that I'm hoping that, for many years to come, we continue that conversation -- a conversation that is necessary, not just around Mona and Rashid's dinner table,’ but around ‘this entire world.’”

Wrote Wallsten: “In the 1970s, when Khalidi taught at a university in Beirut, he often spoke to reporters on behalf of Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization. In the early 1990s, he advised the Palestinian delegation during peace negotiations. Khalidi now occupies a prestigious professorship of Arab studies at Columbia.

“He is seen as a moderate in Palestinian circles, having decried suicide bombings against civilians as a ‘war crime’ and criticized the conduct of Hamas and other Palestinian leaders. Still, many of Khalidi's opinions are troubling to pro-Israel activists, such as his defense of Palestinians' right to resist Israeli occupation and his critique of U.S. policy as biased toward Israel.”

Wallsten had a videotape of the Khalidi party, which conservatives and, as of today Sen. McCain, are calling upon him to release.

"The Los Angeles Times did not publish the videotape because it was provided to us by a confidential source who did so on the condition that we not release it," Russ Stanton, editor of the LA Times, has said. "The Times keeps its promises to sources."

McCain today said, “The Los Angeles Times refuses to make that videotape public...I’m not in the business of talking about media bias...but what if there was a tape of John McCain with a neo-Nazi outfit...I think the treatment of the issue would be slightly different.”But McCain has his own connection to Khalidi.

In 1993, McCain became chairman of the International Republican Institute. He still chairs that respected organization.

That same year, Khalidi helped found the Center for Palestine Research and Studies, self-described as “an independent academic research and policy analysis institution” created to meet “the need for active Palestinian scholarship on issues related to Palestine.” (Its archived Web site is HERE.)

Khalidi was on the board of trustees through 1999.

According to tax returns, the McCain-chaired IRI funded the organization Khalidi founded and served on to the tune of $448,873 in 1998 (click HERE to see the tax return)* as first reported by Seth Couter Walls at HuffPo.

The IRI continued to give money to the CPRS after Khalidi left the group as well.

Asked to respond to this seeming contradiction, McCain-Palin spokesman Michael Goldfarb writes, “It's long been clear that Obama and Khalidi have a close relationship -- that they were frequent dinner companions. It is another in a series of questionable associations, but it is not the focus of our request that the LA Times release this tape. It's clear from the Times story that the evening featured speeches that were anti-Semitic in tone and anti-Israel in nature. As our initial statement said, 'This campaign wants to know how Barack Obama responded to that hate-speech, whether he was mingling with Ayers, who he once described as 'just a guy in my neighborhood,' and anything else that might be of interest to voters now deciding who to support in this election.'”

(Goldfarb is referring to two speakers at Khalidi's 2003 farewell party: "a young Palestinian American (who) recited a poem accusing the Israeli government of terrorism in its treatment of Palestinians and sharply criticizing U.S. support of Israel. If Palestinians cannot secure their own land, she said, 'then you will never see a day of peace,'" and another who "likened 'Zionist settlers on the West Bank' to Osama bin Laden, saying both had been 'blinded by ideology.'")

Continued Goldfarb: “Why would the media withhold information that might be damaging to a presidential candidate? It is certainly a luxury that you and your colleagues have never afforded this campaign.”For his part, Obama was asked about his relationship with Khalidi in May at an event with Jewish voters in Boca Raton, Fla.

“I do know him because I taught at the University of Chicago,” Obama said. “And he is Palestinian. And I do know him and I have had conversations. He is not one of my advisors; he’s not one of my foreign policy people. His kids went to the Lab school where my kids go as well. He is a respected scholar, although he vehemently disagrees with a lot of Israel’s policy.

“To pluck out one person who I know and who I’ve had a conversation with who has very different views than 900 of my friends and then to suggest that somehow that shows that maybe I’m not sufficiently pro-Israel, I think, is a very problematic stand to take," Obama said. "So, we gotta be careful about guilt by association.”

Imagine a Republican sitting in a room where people were being disparaged due to their religion or the color of their skin, and then try to imagine a news organization sitting on a video of the incident. Never happen, it'd be all over the airwaves faster than you can say "news cycle."

Alas, you don't have to imagine someone trying to excuse similar behavior by pointing out tangential associations that have nothing to do with the point under discussion as you've done it already. But hey, if sitting on a board that gives money to an organization that has someone in it who supports terror is bad, then I guess serving on a board where the guy sitting next to you supported terror tactics is even worse, right?

Newspapers often don't give our their notes or support documentation. And if it was going to be requested, it should have been done six months ago, not a week before the electionand thereby used sole to inflame without chance of explanation. And yes, McCain too has had association with the Khalidi.

I too think both McCain and Obama support Israel. And while I am not a fan of the PLO, I think most moderates agree something needs to be doneto resolve this problem or in the end Israel will be the loser.

BBG as have others have stated "that Khalidi supports terror". But what is a "terrorist"? Anyone who opposes us? Anyone who supports the PLO? Agree or disagree, they too believe they are in a war.And many countries (allies) are beginning to support the PLO's position. Just because someone disagrees with you and is Muslim, doesn't make them a terrorist...

And by most articles I have read Khalidi is a moderate. You may not like Obama, but don't you think someone needs to begin a dialogue, to intercede in this dilemma? And it is tough to intercede whenyou are not willing to listen to both sides.

Wrote Wallsten: “In the 1970s, when Khalidi taught at a university in Beirut, he often spoke to reporters on behalf of Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization. In the early 1990s, he advised the Palestinian delegation during peace negotiations. Khalidi now occupies a prestigious professorship of Arab studies at Columbia.

“He is seen as a moderate in Palestinian circles, having decried suicide bombings against civilians as a ‘war crime’ and criticized the conduct of Hamas and other Palestinian leaders. Still, many of Khalidi's opinions are troubling to pro-Israel activists, such as his defense of Palestinians' right to resist Israeli occupation and his critique of U.S. policy as biased toward Israel.”

Also, I doubt if Columbia would hire a true "terrorist" in a full professorship position. A lecturer maybe Rather I think Columbia wants a diverse of opinion. Nothing wrong with that.

For those who maybe don't look at Drudge - you certainly won't see this on MSM unless CNN picks it up only after Fox presses the issue.

To me this is an example of what we are in for and is abuse of power far beyond what the framers of the Constitution would have ever desired.

This is censorship of the press no different than McCarthyism of the 50's and just a starter smaple of what we are in for.

I really can't believe this is happening in 2008. On the one bright side Novak reports the Dems won't get their super majority so fillibustering is this country's last stand against outright socialism.

Of course the 40% of people who pay no taxes don't have a problem with this as the 20 million illegals who will be made legal in a few months. Of course the 30% of people in New Jersey who in some way are either government employees or on the dole in some fashion won't mind bigger government. Don't expect me to be thrilled as a small business man at the concept of taxing me even more and than the Dems giving it right to my employees. Why should I bother? I just might *have* to let one employee go.

I think Republicans just sitting back and hoping that BO will be unpopular in the polls in a few years allowing them to make a comeback with the same old message is a huge tactical blunder. Hoping BO will look like Jimmy Carter is too big a risk. He may not. And he has an adoring press and is dead set on controlling the news, and any opposition. Unlike anyhting Carter did.

I hope I am wrong but I hope even more the Republicans can adjust their message.

The Obama campaign has decided to heave out three newspapers from its plane for the final days of its blitz across battleground states -- and all three endorsed Sen. John McCain for president!

The NY POST, WASHINGTON TIMES and DALLAS MORNING NEWS have all been told to move out by Sunday to make room for network bigwigs -- and possibly for the inclusion of reporters from two black magazines, ESSENCE and JET, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.

Despite pleas from top editors of the three newspapers that have covered the campaign for months at extraordinary cost, the Obama campaign says their reporters -- and possibly others -- will have to vacate their coveted seats so more power players can document the final days of Sen. Barack Obama's historic campaign to become the first black American president.

MORE

Some told the DRUDGE REPORT that the reporters are being ousted to bring on documentary film-makers to record the final days; others expect to see on board more sympathetic members of the media, including the NY TIMES' Maureen Dowd, who once complained that she was barred from McCain's Straight Talk Express airplane.

After a week of quiet but desperate behind-the-scenes negotiations, the reporters of the three papers heard last night that they were definitely off for the final swing. They are already planning how to cover the final days by flying commercial or driving from event to event.

While I happen to agree with you on the issue of ILLEGAL immigrants; yet unfortunately both Obama and McCain seem sympathetic on this issue.

I do however think your "pay no taxes" group gets a bad rap.

First, based on this logic, if I "pay no tax" now why do I care who wins; I will continue to "pay no taxes" so the Obama plan and the McCain tax plan is all the same to me, isn't it? Therefore I doubt if Obama is pandering to this group; they receive no benefit and thereforeno tax incentive to vote for him.

And saying that 40% of the people "pay no tax" forgets payroll taxes which can be up to 15% of earnings. That is still a "tax" isn't it? Perhapsyou mean pay no "income" taxes? But even then that 40% number is misleading.

As for the media, well, when it comes to the plane, I think McCain and Obama both choose their "friends". I think you even pointed out that Dowd with the NY Times had been barred from McCain's plane; his choice I say.

now why do I care who wins; I will continue to "pay no taxes" so the Obama plan and the McCain tax plan is all the same to me, isn't it? Therefore I doubt if Obama is pandering to this group; they receive no benefit and thereforeno tax incentive to vote for him.

Did I say this?

BO is offering rebates to the 40%. I didn't say they don't care - I say they are happy to vote for BO who bleieves in redistribution of wealth. And payroll taxes is not income tax that pays for the supposed federal services that are offered.Although I guess government borrows from these funds.

No, quite the contrary, I think people who pay no income tax get off easy. I think they don't get a rap. And to me that is a problem.Just as it is a problem that the rich are getting richer and the rest going nowhere is a problem I think 40% paying no federal income tax is also a problem and wrong.And the more we run to the left the worse this will get.Yet Reagonimcs while I think is better does not address this wholly either. Now we have Obamanomics. That to me is far worse but both fall short IMHO.

The End of JournalismSometime in 2008, journalism as we knew it died, and advocacy media took its place.

By Victor Davis Hanson

There have always been media biases and prejudices. Everyone knew that Walter Cronkite, from his gilded throne at CBS news, helped to alter the course of the Vietnam War, when, in the post-Tet depression, he prematurely declared the war unwinnible. Dan Rather’s career imploded when he knowingly promulgated a forged document that impugned the service record of George W. Bush. We’ve known for a long time — from various polling, and records of political donations of journalists themselves, as well as surveys of public perceptions — that the vast majority of journalists identify themselves as Democratic, and liberal in particular.

Yet we have never quite seen anything like the current media infatuation with Barack Obama, and its collective desire not to raise key issues of concern to the American people. Here were four areas of national interest that were largely ignored.

CAMPAIGN FINANCINGFor years an axiom of the liberal establishment was the need for public campaign financing — and the corrosive role of private money in poisoning the election process. The most prominent Republican who crossed party lines to ensure the passage of national public campaign financing was John McCain — a maverick stance that cost him dearly among conservatives who resented bitterly federal interference in political expression.

In contrast, Barack Obama, remember, promised that he would accept both public funding and the limitations that went along with it, and would “aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election.” Then in June 2008, Obama abruptly reneged, bowing out entirely from government financing, the first presidential nominee in the general election to do that since the system was created in 1976.

Obama has now raised over $600 million, by far the largest campaign chest in American political history. In many states he enjoys a four-to-one advantage in campaign funding — most telling in his scheduled eleventh-hour, 30-minute specials that will not be answered by the publicly financed and poorer McCain campaign.

The story that the media chose to ignore was not merely the Obama about-face on public financing, or even the enormous amounts of money that he has raised — some of it under dubious circumstances involving foreign donors, prepaid credit cards, and false names. Instead, they were absolutely quiet about a historic end to liberal support for public financing.

For all practical purposes, public financing of the presidential general election is now dead. No Republican will ever agree to it again. No Democrat can ever again dare to defend a system destroyed by Obama. All future worries about the dangers of big money and big politics will fall on deaf ears.

Surely, there will come a time when the Democratic Party, whether for ethical or practical reasons, will sorely regret dismantling the very safeguards that for over three decades it had insisted was critical for the survival of the republic.

Imagine the reaction of the New York Times or the Washington Post had John McCain renounced his promise to participate in public campaign financing, proceeded instead to amass $600 million and outraise the publicly financed Barack Obama four-to-one, and begun airing special 30-minute unanswered infomercials during the last week of the campaign.

THE VP CANDIDATESWe know now almost all the details of Sarah Palin’s pregnancies, whether the trooper who tasered her nephew went to stun or half stun, the cost of her clothes, and her personal expenses — indeed, almost everything except how a mother of so many children gets elected councilwoman, mayor, and governor, routs an entrenched old-boy cadre, while maintaining near record levels of public support.

Yet the American public knows almost nothing of what it should about the extraordinary career of Joe Biden, the 36-year veteran of the Senate. In unprecedented fashion, Biden has simply avoided the press for most of the last two months, confident that the media instead would deconstruct almost every word of “good looking” Sarah Palin’s numerous interviews with mostly hostile interrogators.

By accepted standards of behavior, Biden has sadly proven wanting. He has committed almost every classical sin of character — plagiarism, false biography, racial insensitivity, and serial fabrication. And because of media silence, we don’t know whether he was kidding when he said America would not need to burn coal, or that Hezbollah was out of Lebanon, or that FDR addressed the nation on television as president in 1929 (surely a record for historical fictions in a single thought), or that the public would turn sour on Obama once he was challenged by our enemies abroad. In response, the media reported that the very public Sarah Palin was avoiding the press while the very private Joe Biden shunned interviews and was chained to the teleprompter.

For two months now, the media reaction to Biden’s inanity has been simply “that’s just ol’ Joe, now let’s turn to Palin,” who, in the space of two months, has been reduced from a popular successful governor to a backwoods creationist, who will ban books and champion white secessionist causes. The respective coverage of the two candidates is ironic in a variety of ways, but in one especially — almost every charge against Palin (that she is under wraps, untruthful, and inept) was applicable only to Biden.

So we are about to elect a vice president about whom we know only that he has been around a long time, but little else — and nothing at all why exactly Joe Biden says the most astounding and often lunatic things.

Imagine the reaction of Newsweek or Time had moose-hunting mom Sarah Palin claimed FDR went on television to address the nation as President in 1929, or warned America that our enemies abroad would test John McCain and that his response would result in a radical loss of his popularity at home.

THE PAST AS PRESENTIn 2004, few Americans knew Barack Obama. In 2008, they may elect him. Surely his past was of more interest than his present serial denials of it. Whatever the media’s feelings about the current Barack Obama, there should have been some story that the Obama of 2008 is radically different from the Obama who was largely consistent and predictable for the prior 30 years.

Each Obama metamorphosis in itself might be attributed to the normal evolution to the middle, as a candidate shifts from the primary to the general election. But in the case of Obama, we witnessed not a shift, but a complete transformation to an entirely new persona — in almost every imaginable sense of the word. Name an issue — FISA, NAFTA, guns, abortion, capital punishment, coal, nuclear power, drilling, Iran, Jerusalem, the surge — and Obama’s position today is not that of just a year ago.

Until 2005, Obama was in communication with Bill Ayers by e-mail and phone, despite Ayers reprehensible braggadocio in 2001 that he remained an unrepentant terrorist. Rev. Wright was an invaluable spiritual advisor — until spring of 2008. Father Pfleger was praised as an intimate friend in 2004 — and vanished off the radar in 2008. The media might have asked not just why these rather dubious figures were once so close to, and then so distant from, Obama; but why were there so many people like Rashid Khalidi and Tony Rezko in Obama’s past in the first place?

Behind the Olympian calm of Obama, there was always a rather disturbing record of extra-electoral politics completely ignored by the media. If one were disturbed by the present shenanigans of ACORN or the bizarre national call for Americans simply to skip work on election day to help elect Obama (who would pay for that?), one would only have to remember that in 1996 Obama took the extraordinary step of suing to eliminate all his primary rivals by challenging their petition signatures of mostly African-American voters.

In 2004, there was an even more remarkable chain of events in which the sealed divorce records of both his principle primary rival Blair Hull and general election foe, Jack Ryan, were mysteriously leaked, effectively ensuring Obama a Senate seat without serious opposition. These were not artifacts of a typical political career, but extraordinary events in themselves that might well have shed light on present campaign tactics — and yet largely remain unknown to the American people.

Imagine the reaction of CNN or NBC had John McCain’s pastor and spiritual advisor of 20 years been revealed as a white supremacist who damned a multiracial United States, or had he been a close acquaintance until 2005 of an unrepentant terrorist bomber of abortion clinics, or had McCain himself sued to eliminate congressional opponents by challenging the validity of African-American voters who signed petitions, or had both his primary and general election senatorial rivals imploded once their sealed divorce records were mysteriously leaked.

SOCIALISM?The eleventh-hour McCain allegations of Obama’s advocacy for a share-the-wealth socialism was generally ignored by the media, or if covered, written off as neo-McCarthyism. But there were two legitimate, but again neglected, issues.

The first was the nature of the Obama tax plan. The problem was not merely upping the income tax rates on those who made $250,000 (or was it $200,000, or was it $150,000, or both, or none?), but its aggregate effect in combination with lifting the FICA ceilings on high incomes on top of existing Medicare contributions and often high state income taxes.

In other words, Americans who live in high-tax, expensive states like a New York or California could in theory face collective confiscatory tax rates of 65 percent or so on much of their income. And, depending on the nature of Obama’s proposed tax exemptions, on the other end of the spectrum we might well see almost half the nation’s wage earners pay no federal income tax at all.

Questions arise, but were again not explored: How wise is it to exempt one out of every two income earners from any worry over how the nation gathers its federal income tax revenue? And when credits are added to the plan, are we now essentially not cutting or raising taxes, but simply diverting wealth from those who pay into the system to those who do not?

A practical effect of socialism is often defined as curbing productive incentives by ensuring the poorer need not endanger their exemptions and credits by seeking greater income; and discouraging the wealthy from seeking greater income, given that nearly two-thirds of additional wealth would be lost to taxes. Surely that discussion might have been of interest to the American people.

Second, the real story was not John McCain’s characterization of such plans, but both inadvertent, and serial descriptions of them, past and present, by Barack Obama himself. “Spreading the wealth around” gains currency when collated to past interviews in which Obama talked at length about, and in regret at, judicial impracticalities in accomplishing his own desire to redistribute income. “Tragedy” is frequent in the Obama vocabulary, but largely confined to two contexts: the tragic history of the United States (e.g., deemed analogous to that of Nazi Germany during World War II), and the tragic unwillingness or inability to use judicial means to correct economic inequality in non-democratic fashion.

In this regard, remember Obama’s revealing comment that he was interested only in “fairness” in increasing capital-gains taxes, despite the bothersome fact that past moderate reductions in rates had, in fact, brought in greater revenue to government. Again, fossilized ideology trumps empiricism.

Imagine the reaction of NPR and PBS had John McCain advocated something like abolishing all capital gains taxes, or repealing incomes taxes in favor of a national retail sales tax.

The media has succeeded in shielding Barack Obama from journalistic scrutiny. It thereby irrevocably destroyed its own reputation and forfeited the trust that generations of others had so carefully acquired. And it will never again be trusted to offer candid and nonpartisan coverage of presidential candidates.

Worse still, the suicide of both print and electronic journalism has ensured that, should Barack Obama be elected president, the public will only then learn what they should have known far earlier about their commander-in-chief — but in circumstances and from sources they may well regret.

I assume its Matthews saying he will do everything he can to support and cover for BO "for the good of the country".Of course when W was President he did everything he could to destroy the President, I assume, "for the good of our country".

Joe Scarborough laughed when Matthews claimed it was "his job" to do this. "Your job" he asked. "I thought you are a journalist?"

Matthews was already on MSNBC last night claiming BOs attempt at humor was "really really funny". I guess he meant the "mutt" comment.I am not sure if he was claiming BOs Nancy Reagan insult was also funny, because I changed the station. I thought BOs discussion about the dog was a tangential waste of time. The cheap shot at NR was just that. Neither was really really funny but that was Matthews spin at making BO appear to be a raging success. MSNBC states the USA is already getting dividends from the BO presidency(which by the way hasn't yet started) because Iran congratulated him and Iraq is elated the US will not pull out.

With regards to MSNBC I really don't recall a "MSM" outlet doing everything it can to humiliate and insult people who recently lost an election like they are doing to Palin, McCain, and the losing party in general.

As O'Reilly has pointed out, even any attempt at objective journalist in the USA is past history. He made an off the cuff comment to Bernie Goldberg that "we are old and almost dead anyway".

I had an elderly patient in her 80s tell me her brother made a similar comment to the effect, "aren't you glad we are on the way out with what is going on today?."

Dan Mirvish, who with Eitan Gorlin created an elaborate Internet hoax complete with a fake policy institute and a phony adviser to Senator John McCain.

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑAPublished: November 12, 2008 NYTIt was among the juicier post-election recriminations: Fox News Channel quoted an unnamed McCain campaign figure as saying that Sarah Palin did not know that Africa was a continent.

Who would say such a thing? On Monday the answer popped up on a blog and popped out of the mouth of David Shuster, an MSNBC anchor. “Turns out it was Martin Eisenstadt, a McCain policy adviser, who has come forward today to identify himself as the source of the leaks,” Mr. Shuster said.

Trouble is, Martin Eisenstadt doesn’t exist. His blog does, but it’s a put-on. The think tank where he is a senior fellow — the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy — is just a Web site. The TV clips of him on YouTube are fakes.

And the claim of credit for the Africa anecdote is just the latest ruse by Eisenstadt, who turns out to be a very elaborate hoax that has been going on for months. MSNBC, which quickly corrected the mistake, has plenty of company in being taken in by an Eisenstadt hoax, including The New Republic and The Los Angeles Times.

Now a pair of obscure filmmakers say they created Martin Eisenstadt to help them pitch a TV show based on the character. But under the circumstances, why should anyone believe a word they say?

“That’s a really good question,” one of the two, Eitan Gorlin, said with a laugh.

(For what it’s worth, another reporter for The New York Times is an acquaintance of Mr. Gorlin and vouches for his identity, and Mr. Gorlin is indeed “Mr. Eisenstadt” in those videos. He and his partner in deception, Dan Mirvish, have entries on the Internet Movie Database, imdb.com. But still. ...)

They say the blame lies not with them but with shoddiness in the traditional news media and especially the blogosphere.

“With the 24-hour news cycle they rush into anything they can find,” said Mr. Mirvish, 40.

Mr. Gorlin, 39, argued that Eisenstadt was no more of a joke than half the bloggers or political commentators on the Internet or television.

An MSNBC spokesman, Jeremy Gaines, explained the network’s misstep by saying someone in the newsroom received the Palin item in an e-mail message from a colleague and assumed it had been checked out. “It had not been vetted,” he said. “It should not have made air.”

But most of Eisenstadt’s victims have been bloggers, a reflection of the sloppy speed at which any tidbit, no matter how specious, can bounce around the Internet. And they fell for the fake material despite ample warnings online about Eisenstadt, including the work of one blogger who spent months chasing the illusion around cyberspace, trying to debunk it.

The hoax began a year ago with short videos of a parking valet character, who Mr. Gorlin and Mr. Mirvish said was the original idea for a TV series.

Soon there were videos showing him driving a car while spouting offensive, opinionated nonsense in praise of Rudolph W. Giuliani. Those videos attracted tens of thousands of Internet hits and a bit of news media attention.

When Mr. Giuliani dropped out of the presidential race, the character morphed into Eisenstadt, a parody of a blowhard cable news commentator.

Mr. Gorlin said they chose the name because “all the neocons in the Bush administration had Jewish last names and Christian first names.”

Eisenstadt became an adviser to Senator John McCain and got a blog, updated occasionally with comments claiming insider knowledge, and other bloggers began quoting and linking to it. It mixed weird-but-true items with false ones that were plausible, if just barely.

The inventors fabricated the Harding Institute, named for one of the most scorned presidents, and made Eisenstadt a senior fellow.

It didn’t hurt that a man named Michael Eisenstadt is a real expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and is quoted in the mainstream media. The real Mr. Eisenstadt said in an interview that he was only dimly aware of the fake one, and that his main concern was that people understood that “I had nothing to do with this.”

Before long Mr. Gorlin and Mr. Mirvish had produced a short documentary on Martin Eisenstadt, supposedly for the BBC, posted in several parts on YouTube.

In June they produced what appeared to be an interview with Eisenstadt on Iraqi television promoting construction of a casino in the Green Zone in Baghdad. Then they sent out a news release in which he apologized. Outraged Iraqi bloggers protested the casino idea.

Among the Americans who took that bait was Jonathan Stein, a reporter for Mother Jones. A few hours later Mr. Stein put up a post on the magazine’s political blog, with the title “Hoax Alert: Bizarre ‘McCain Adviser’ Too Good to Be True,” and explained how he had been fooled.

In July, after the McCain campaign compared Senator Barack Obama to Paris Hilton, the Eisenstadt blog said “the phone was burning off the hook” at McCain headquarters, with angry calls from Ms. Hilton’s grandfather and others. A Los Angeles Times political blog, among others, retold the story, citing Eisenstadt by name and linking to his blog.

Last month Eisenstadt blogged that Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, Joe the Plumber, was closely related to Charles Keating, the disgraced former savings and loan chief. It wasn’t true, but other bloggers ran with it.

Among those taken in by Monday’s confession about the Palin Africa report was The New Republic’s political blog. Later the magazine posted this atop the entry: “Oy — this would appear to be a hoax. Apologies.”

But the truth was out for all to see long before the big-name take-downs. For months sourcewatch.org has identified Martin Eisenstadt as a hoax. When Mr. Stein was the victim, he blogged that “there was enough info on the Web that I should have sussed this thing out.”

And then there is William K. Wolfrum, a blogger who has played Javert to Eisenstadt’s Valjean, tracking the hoaxster across cyberspace and repeatedly debunking his claims. Mr. Gorlin and Mr. Mirvish praised his tenacity, adding that the news media could learn something from him.

“As if there isn’t enough misinformation on this election, it was shocking to see so much time wasted on things that didn’t exist,” Mr. Wolfrum said in an interview.

And how can we know that Mr. Wolfrum is real and not part of the hoax?

The Gray Lady undermines national security ... againThere they go again. The New York Times, continuing its policy of aiding and abetting this nation's enemies, on Monday published the latest classified anti-terrorist program to come to its attention. This revelation covers a secret order that authorized covert military action inside Syria, Pakistan and "elsewhere" (a quick look at the map to see what lies between Pakistan and Syria will discover "elsewhere"). Citing military and civilian sources, The Times reports that nearly a dozen such raids have been carried out since 2004. We can only imagine the gratitude felt by those brave special-ops soldiers carrying out these missions that their activities are public knowledge.

Freedom of the press is one of the most important rights enshrined in the Constitution. Its position as part of the First Amendment is no accident, indicating the importance the Founders gave to a press able to report freely and without fear on the activities of government. Even in wartime, the government should not censor the media unless truly extraordinary circumstances dictate otherwise. But there is also a reason for the government's classification of information, including this definition of Top Secret: "information of a highly sensitive nature, whose disclosure could result in grave danger to the national security of the United States." At what point does The Times consider that protecting our national security is more important than scoring political points against the Bush administration?

Answer: They don't consider it. The only stories they'll bury is anything that might harm Barack Obama. They are fine with getting SpecOps soldiers killed. They'll then run an op-ed bemoaning the loss of the soldiers, blaming President Bush all the while.

I think a lot dates back to the publication or the government's request for restraint of publication of the Pentagon Papers.

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of the first amendment and justified publication for the greater good.

Decision

6-3 The decision finally stated that the Supreme Court agreed with the two lower courts which had originally decided that the Government had not met that burden, so the prior restraint was not justified. This final decision was not signed by any particular justice.The Per Curiam opinion itself in this case was very brief because all the Court wanted to state was that it had concurred with the decisions of the two lower courts to reject the Government’s request for an injunction. The Justices’ opinions included different degrees of support for the clear superiority of the First Amendment and no Justice fully supported the Government’s case. Because of these factors, no clear and exclusive law appears to have come out of this case. Nevertheless, the significance of the case and the wording of the Justices’ opinions have added important statements to the history of precedents for exceptions to the First Amendment, which have been cited in numerous Supreme Court cases since .Justice Hugo Black wrote an opinion that elaborated on his absolutist view of the First Amendment. He was against any interference with freedom of expression and largely found the content of the documents to be immaterial. Justice William O. Douglas (1898-1980) largely concurred with Black, citing the need for a free press as a check on government.Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. explained how the publication of the documents did not qualify as one of the three exceptions to the freedom of expression established in Near v. Minnesota (1931).Justice Potter Stewart and Justice Byron R. White agreed that it is the responsibility of the Executive to ensure national security through the protection of its information. However, in areas of national defense and international affairs, the President of United States possesses great constitutional independence that is virtually unchecked by the Legislative and Judicial branch. "In absence of governmental checks and balances," per Justice Stewart, "the only effective restraint upon executive policy and power in [these two areas] may lie in an enlightened citizenry - in an informed and critical public opinion which alone can here protect the values of democratic government."Justice Thurgood Marshall established the notion that the term “national security” was too broad when legitimizing prior restraint, and also argued that it is not the Court’s job to create laws where the Congress cannot.Justice Warren E. Burger, dissenting, argued that “the imperative of a free and unfettered press comes into collision with another imperative, the effective functioning of a complex modern government," that there should be a detailed study on the effects of these actions. He argued that in the haste of the proceedings, and given the size of the documents, the Court was unable to gather enough information to make a decision. He also argued that the Times should have discussed the possible societal repercussions with the Government prior to publication of the material. The Chief Justice did not argue that the Government had met the aforementioned standard, but rather that the decision should not have been made so hastily.Justice John M. Harlan and Justice Harry A. Blackmun joined the Chief Justice in arguing the faults in the proceedings, and the lack of attention towards national security and the rights of the Executive.

We will never know how many Ukrainians died in Stalin's famines of the early 1930s. As Nikita Khrushchev later recalled, "No one was keeping count." Writing back in the mid- 1980s, historian Robert Conquest came up with a death toll of around six million, a calculation not so inconsistent with later research (the writers of The Black Book of Communism (1999) estimated a total of four million for 1933 alone).

Four million, six million, seven million, when the numbers are this grotesque does the exact figure matter? Just remember this instead:

The first family to die was the Rafalyks — father, mother and a child. Later on the Fediy family of five also perished of starvation. Then followed the families of Prokhar Lytvyn (four persons), Fedir Hontowy (three persons), Samson Fediy (three persons). The second child of the latter family was beaten to death on somebody's onion patch. Mykola and Larion Fediy died, followed by Andrew Fediy and his wife; Stefan Fediy; Anton Fediy, his wife and four children (his two other little girls survived); Boris Fediy, his wife and three children: Olanviy Fediy and his wife; Taras Fediy and his wife; Theodore Fesenko; Constantine Fesenko; Melania Fediy; Lawrenty Fediy; Peter Fediy; Eulysis Fediy and his brother Fred; Isidore Fediy, his wife and two children; Ivan Hontowy, his wife and two children; Vasyl Perch, his wife and child; Makar Fediy; Prokip Fesenko: Abraham Fediy; Ivan Skaska, his wife and eight children.

Some of these people were buried in a cemetery plot; others were left lying wherever they died. For instance, Elizabeth Lukashenko died on the meadow; her remains were eaten by ravens. Others were simply dumped into any handy excavation. The remains of Lawrenty Fediy lay on the hearth of his dwelling until devoured by rats.*

And that's just one village — Fediivka, in the Poltava Province.

We will never know whether Walter Duranty, the principal New York Times correspondent in the U.S.S.R., ever visited Fediivka. Almost certainly not. What we do know is that, in March 1933, while telling his readers that there had indeed been "serious food shortages" in the Ukraine, he was quick to reassure them that "there [was] no actual starvation." There had been no "deaths from starvation," he soothed, merely "widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition." So that was all right then.

But, unlike Khrushchev, Duranty, a Pulitzer Prize winner, no less, was keeping count — in the autumn of 1933 he is recorded as having told the British Embassy that ten million had died. ** "The Ukraine," he said, "had been bled white," remarkable words from the journalist who had, only days earlier, described talk of a famine as "a sheer absurdity," remarkable words from the journalist who, in a 1935 memoir had dismayingly little to say about one of history's greatest crimes. Writing about his two visits to the Ukraine in 1933, Duranty was content to describe how "the people looked healthier and more cheerful than [he] had expected, although they told grim tales of their sufferings in the past two years." As Duranty had explained (writing about his trip to the Ukraine in April that year), he "had no doubt that the solution to the agrarian problem had been found".

Well, at least he didn't refer to it as a "final" solution.

As the years passed, and the extent of the famine and the other, innumerable, brutalities of Stalin's long tyranny became increasingly difficult to deny, Duranty's reputation collapsed (I wrote about this on NRO a couple of years ago), but his Pulitzer Prize has endured.

Ah, that Pulitzer Prize. In his will old Joseph Pulitzer described what the prize was designed to achieve: " The encouragement of public service, public morals, American literature, and the advancement of education."

In 1932 the Pulitzer Board awarded Walter Duranty its prize. It's an achievement that the New York Times still celebrates. The gray lady is pleased to publish its storied Pulitzer roster in a full-page advertisement each year, and, clearly, it finds the name of Duranty as one that is still fit to print. His name is near the top of the list, an accident of chronology, but there it is, Duranty, Times man, denier of the Ukrainian genocide — proudly paraded for all to see. Interestingly, the list of prizewinners posted on the New York Times Company's website is more forthcoming: Against Duranty's name, it is noted that "other writers in the Times and elsewhere have discredited this coverage."

Understandably enough, Duranty's Pulitzer is an insult that has lost none of its power to appall. In a new initiative, Ukrainian groups have launched a fresh campaign designed to persuade the Pulitzer Prize Board to revoke the award to Duranty. The Pulitzer's nabobs do not appear to be impressed. A message dated April 29, 2003 from the board's administrator to one of the organizers of the Ukrainian campaign includes the following words:

The current Board is aware that complaints about the Duranty award have surfaced again. [The campaign's] submission…will be placed on file with others we have received. However, to date, the Board has not seen fit to reverse a previous Board's decision, made seventy years ago in a different era and under different circumstances.

A "different era," "different circumstances" — would that have been said, I wonder, about someone who had covered up Nazi savagery? But then, more relevantly, the Pulitzer's representative notes that Duranty's prize was awarded "for a specific set of stories in 1931," in other words, before the famine struck with its full, horrific, force. And there he has a point. The prize is designed to reward a specific piece of journalism — not a body of work. To strip Duranty of the prize on the grounds of his subsequent conduct, however disgusting it may have been, would be a retrospective change of the rules, behavior more typical of the old U.S.S.R. than today's U.S.A.

But what was that "specific set of stories?" Duranty won his prize " for [his] dispatches on Russia especially the working out of the Five Year Plan." They were, said the Pulitzer Board "marked by scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment and exceptional clarity…."

Really? As summarized by S. J. Taylor in her excellent — and appropriately titled — biography of Duranty, Stalin's Apologist, the statement with which Duranty accepted his prize gives some hint of the "sound judgment" contained in his dispatches.

""Despite present imperfections," he continued, he had come to realize there was something very good about the Soviets' "planned system of economy." And there was something more: Duranty had learned, he said, "to respect the Soviet leaders, especially Stalin, who [had grown] into a really great statesman.""

In truth, of course, this was simply nonsense, a distortion that, in some ways bore even less resemblance to reality than "Jimmy's World," the tale of an eight-year-old junkie that, briefly, won a Pulitzer for Janet Cooke of the Washington Post. Tragic "Jimmy" turned out not to exist. He was a concoction, a fiction, nothing more. The Post did the right thing — Cooke's prize was rapidly returned.

After 70 years the New York Times has yet to do the right thing. There is, naturally, always room for disagreement over how events are interpreted, particularly in an era of revolutionary change, but Duranty's writings clearly tipped over into propaganda, and, often, outright deception, a cynical sugarcoating of the squalor of a system in which he almost certainly didn't believe. His motivation seems to have been purely opportunistic, access to the Moscow "story" for the Times and the well-paid lifestyle and the fame ("the Great Duranty" was, some said, the best-known journalist in the world) that this brought. Too much criticism of Stalin's rule and this privileged existence would end. Duranty's "Stalin" was a lie, not much more genuine than Janet Cooke's "Jimmy" and, as he well knew at the time, so too were the descriptions of the Soviet experiment that brought him that Pulitzer.

And if that is not enough to make the Pulitzer Board to reconsider withdrawing an award that disgraces both the name of Joseph Pulitzer and his prize, it is up to the New York Times to insist that it does so.

*From an account quoted in Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow. ** On another occasion (a dinner party, ironically) that autumn Duranty talked about seven million deaths.

An elderly patient of mine in her late 80s recently passed away.Her son told me of her incredible story of survival in Ukraine in the 30s and 40s. She watched her whole family starve to death before her eyes. They worked as virtual slaves for Stalin and the saved what food they could only to have the Russians come in a steal it all for their troops.

She was later in Germany during the allied bombings and told stories of the firestorms. She told her son this was bliss compared to how Russians treated them when they were later shipped to Siberia.

She came to this country in the 1950's. She was grateful to be here and only asked for one thing. A job to be able to pay her way. She was not like the immigrants of today who come here and abuse our systems and expect amnesty and make up phoney social security numbers and then get outright indignant when anyone questions this.

Her son, also a patient of mine stated the Ukrains are terrible publicizers and chronicalers of history. He rightly pointed out how Jews are great at reminding the world about what happened to them but no one ever hears about what was done to them. He said this in an admiring way.But then I guess he didn't realize I am Jewish when he told me how one of the Russians generals, "a Jew", suggested to Stalin that the easiest way to deal with the Ukraines was to simply let them starve. And Stalin took his advice.

I listened. I thanked him for sharing his mother's story. I suggested he write it all down. Maybe he could send it to the Holocaust museum.

We should all let President-elect Obama have some honeymoon time, but that said, so far the sudden cessation in 'hope and change' that became part of the American mindset for two years is surreal, and one of the most remarkable developments in recent American political history. Obama's Clintonite appointments, his reliance on those well-known DC fixtures credentialed by Ivy League Law Schools, and his apparent backtracking on radical tax hikes on the "wealthy", instantaneous shut-down of Gitmo, prompt withdrawal from Iraq, and repeal of anti-terror legislation seem to have delighted conservatives, relieved that the Daily Kos and Huffington Post are not calling the shots. But two minor points, it is still November, not late January. So no one knows anything yet and we should suspend judgement, despite the FDR and Lincoln daily comparisons.

Second, if we should see in January that the government really does not want to evict Khalid Sheik Mohammed & co. from Guantanamo, and does want to stay in Iraq until 2011 to finish up, and does want to let the present tax code ride for a bit, and does want to leave most Bush-enacted homeland security measures in place, then Obama has not merely embarrassed his hard-left base, but has terribly humiliated the media as well.

For years now we have been preached to that Guantanamo is a gulag where Korans are stomped and flushed (not laptops provided to the chief architect of 9/11), that we waged a foolhardy, amoral, and hopelessly 'lost' war against the Iraqi people, that the rich plundered the economy on the backs of the poor, and that the Constitution was burned so that covert agencies could play James Bond. I could go on, but you get the picture.

Given all that, are we now suddenly—in 1984-fashion—around late January either to be told all that was not quite so, or will we simply hear no more about how these Bush legacies have ruined America—or what exactly is the party line to be? There is still such a thing, after all, as Google.

The point is that somewhere around early to mid-2007 ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, Newsweek, Time, etc. chose to become—in the manner that they selected, emphasized, and presented their news stories—a quasi-official Obama media, or at least a quasi-official what-they-thought-Obama-was news media. Chris Matthews' asinine statement about his investment in the success of the Obama administration was merely a crude summation of the creed of the more sober and judicious.

I don't really think they can now pull off an Animal-Farm-like 'two-legs were bad', 'now two-legs good' complete turn-about just because they've taken over the manor. I do think that the media's unprofessional lobbying for the cause of Obama—not now, but in a decade or two—will become a classic case study in any graduate class on journalistic ethics.

For purposes of self-justification, Azam Amir Kasab, the only terrorist taken alive in last week's Mumbai massacre, offered that the murder of Jews in the city's Chabad House was undertaken to avenge Israeli atrocities on Palestinians. Two other terrorists cited instances of anti-Muslim Hindu violence as the answer to the question, "Why are you doing this to us?" before mowing down 14 unarmed people at the Oberoi Hotel. And if dead terrorists could talk, we would surely hear Abu Ghraib mentioned as among their reasons for singling out U.S. and British hostages.

David KleinOne suspects the terrorists spent far too much time listening to the BBC World Service.

Let's hasten to add that by no means should the BBC alone be singled out. When it comes to terrorists and their grievances, nearly all the Western media have provided them with a rich diet on which to feed.

In the spring of 2005, Newsweek ran with a thinly sourced item about the Quran being flushed down a Guantanamo toilet. Result: At least 15 people were killed in Afghan riots.

Newsweek later retracted the story, which was the right thing to do but also, in its way, exceptional. Compare that to the refusal of French reporter Charles Enderlin and his station, France 2, to retract or even express doubt about his September 2000 report on Mohammed al-Durrah, the 12-year-old Palestinian boy allegedly killed by Israeli soldiers during an exchange of gunfire in the Gaza Strip -- an exchange Mr. Enderlin did not witness.

In an exhaustive piece in the June 2003 issue of the Atlantic, James Fallows observed that the evidence that the boy could not have been shot by an Israeli bullet is overwhelming, while the evidence that the entire incident was staged is, at the very least, impressive. In France, the story has been the subject of various lawsuits. In Israel, however, and throughout the Muslim world, Durrah became the poster child for a five-year intifada that took several thousand lives.

Maybe Durrah was somewhere in the minds of the Mumbai killers. If not, there was no shortage of other Israeli "atrocities" for them to choose from, mostly fictitious or trumped up and all endlessly cited in Western media reports: the "siege" of Gaza; the 2002 Jenin "massacre"; the 1982 massacres (by Lebanese Phalangists) in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut; the execution of Egyptian POWs in 1967.

All these fables have real-world consequences, and not only for Israelis. In July 2006, an American named Naveed Afzal Haq ambled into the offices of the Seattle Jewish Federation and shot six people, killing one. One of the survivors testified that Mr. Haq "stated that he was a Muslim, [and] this was his personal statement against Jews and the Bush administration for giving money to Jews, and for us Jews for giving money to Israel, about Hezbollah, the war in Iraq." Wherever did he get those ideas?

As it turns out, often from terrorist suspects themselves, offering their testimonials of Israeli or U.S. malevolence to a credulous Western media. In the Quran-in-the-toilet imbroglio, for instance, the Nation's Ari Berman filed a piece titled "Newsweek Was Right," which cited accounts by former Guantanamo detainees of how their captors abused the Holy Book. Unmentioned in any of this were the instructions contained in al Qaeda's "Manchester Document," obtained by British police in 2000, that told followers to "complain of mistreatment while in prison" and "insist on proving that torture was inflicted on them by State Security."

Or consider the tale of Ali Shalal Qaissi, the subject of a New York Times story in March 2006. Mr. Qaissi, founder of the Association of Victims of American Occupation Prisons, claimed to be the black-hooded man standing on a box, attached to wires, ghoulishly photographed by the Abu Ghraib jailers. The Times thought enough of his story to put it on page one, until it turned out he wasn't the man. A March 18, 2006, "Editor's Note" tells us something about how these stories make it to print:

"The Times did not adequately research Mr. Qaissi's insistence that he was the man in the photograph. Mr. Qaissi's account had already been broadcast and printed by other outlets, including PBS and Vanity Fair, without challenge. Lawyers for former prisoners at Abu Ghraib vouched for him. Human rights workers seemed to support his account."

Of course, it's always possible to fall for a well-told lie. But it's worth wondering why a media that treats nearly every word uttered by the U.S., British or Israeli governments as inherently suspect has proved so consistently credulous when it comes to every dubious or defamatory claim made against those governments. Or, for that matter, why the media has been so intent on magnifying genuine scandals (like Abu Ghraib) to the point that they become the moral equivalent of 9/11. Some caution is in order: Terrorists, of all people, might actually believe what they read in the papers.

Yesterday's item on Gov. Rod Blagojevich's alleged attempt to sell Barack Obama's erstwhile Senate seat cited a pair of reports from KHQA-TV in Quincy, Ill., contradicting Obama aide David Axelrod's claim that Obama never discussed the Senate appointment with Blagojevich, a claim that contradicted Axelrod's own earlier claim that he knew the governor and the president-elect had discussed the matter.

The first KHQA report, on Nov. 5, said that Obama was "meeting with Governor Rod Blagojevich this afternoon in Chicago to discuss" the nomination. The second, three days later, said that the meeting had taken place. Never mind, KHQA now says:

KHQA TV wishes to offer clarification regarding a story that appeared last month on our website ConnectTristates.com. The story, which discussed the appointment of a replacement for President Elect Obama in the U.S. Senate, became the subject of much discussion on talk radio and on blog sites Wednesday.The story housed in our website archive was on the morning of November 5, 2008. It suggested that a meeting was scheduled later that day between President Elect Obama and Illinois Governor Blagojevich. KHQA has no knowledge that any meeting ever took place. Governor Blagojevich did appear at a news conference in Chicago on that date. To call this a "clarification" is rather an understatement, like saying that KHQA's performance in this matter is not the proudest moment in the history of American journalism. In any case, the "clarified" KHQA report was, as far as we know, the only evidence, aside from Axelrod's now-recanted statement, that Obama and Blagojevich had discussed the matter. Even assuming no conversation took place between the two principals, we still are left with the question of when the Obama team became aware of Blagojevich's alleged scheme and what if anything they did about it.

Jim Lindgren has a detailed and suggestive timeline. He points to a CNN report from Nov. 9, the Sunday after Election Day, in which "a prominent Democratic source close to" Obama confirms an earlier report by Chicago's WSL-TV "that Valerie Jarrett is Obama's choice to replace him in the Senate."

"On Monday, Nov. 10," Lindgren recounts, quoting the criminal complaint, "Blagojevich holds an incredible 2-hour conference call with multiple consultants: 'ROD BLAGOJEVICH, his wife, JOHN HARRIS, Governor General Counsel, and various Washington-D.C. based advisors, including Advisor B,' discussing his corrupt schemes. He follows this with two calls with Advisor A."

The same day, the CNN story linked above was updated:

Two Democratic sources told CNN Monday that Obama wants Jarrett to serve in the White House, not the Senate.Here is Lindgren's analysis:

So what happened? The likeliest scenario is that one of the many participants in Blagojevich's Monday phone calls either floated his plans to the Obama transition team to assess their response or tipped off the Obama camp about the reckless ideas that Blagojevich had planned.In any event, within hours of Blagojevich substantially expanding his circle of confidants, the Obama camp withdrew Jarrett's name from consideration and attributed that withdrawal to the President's wanting Jarrett in the White House. And the Obama staffers went out of their way to depict this as Obama's choice, rather than Jarrett's, which would have been more common. The report claims Obama's involvement in the decision and suggests a direct effort to undercut the idea that Obama was pressuring Blagojevich to appoint Jarrett.Lindgren speculates that Rep. Rahm Emanuel, Blagojevich's successor in the House and Obama's designated chief of staff, was the Obama camp's point of contact with the Blagojevich camp. As National Review's Byron York points out, the L.A. Times asked Obama specifically about this, and he ducked the question (ellipses in transcript):

Q: Have you ever spoken to Gov. Blagojevich about the Senate seat?Obama: I have not discussed the Senate seat with the governor at any time. My strong belief is that it needed to be filled by somebody who is going to represent the people of Illinois and fight for them. And beyond that, I was focused on the transition.Q: And that was before and after the election?Obama: Yes.Q: Are you aware of any conversations between Blagojevich or [chief of staff] John Harris and any of your top aides, including Rahm [Emanuel]?Obama: Let me stop you there because . . . it's an ongoing . . . investigation. I think it would be inappropriate for me to, you know, remark on the situation beyond the facts that I know. And that's the fact that I didn't discuss this issue with the governor at all.What would be the significance if Emanuel turned out to have known about the alleged bribery attempt? Legally, not much, according to Lindgren:

It is not a crime to fail to report a bribery attempt. The federal misprision of felony statute would seem to make it a federal crime to fail to report a federal felony. . . .But case law has conclusively determined that mere non-reporting is not enough. Active concealment or the acceptance of a benefit for concealing is required.Since all indications are that the Obama camp rejected any corrupt deal, they would seem to be legally in the clear. In their refusal to make a deal, it would appear their instinct for self-preservation served them well. It would be more impressive, though, if it turns out they did the public-spirited thing and reported Blagojevich's conduct to the authorities.

Obama's "ongoing investigation" dodge has drawn criticism from both right and left (the latter has likened it to President Bush's refusal to comment during the investigation of the Valerie Plame kerfuffle). Yet prosecutors generally do not like prospective witnesses to talk about a case publicly, and surely we want Obama and his aides to cooperate with prosecutors. It does put Obama in a politically awkward position, though, especially if the facts he is constrained from discussing publicly reflect well on him and his advisers.

Who Was Dick Simpson? He is a political scientist at the University of Illinois at Chicago whom Reuters quoted yesterday (as we noted) as saying, "Obama is not related to the corruption pattern in Chicago," and, "He has not been pressing for any person to replace him in his Senate seat."

Simpson is also a former Chicago alderman--a fact that seems relevant, but that Reuters omitted.

Republicans are simpletons and Democrats are geniuses. So says the MSM. Unfortunately having a Republican President for 8 years who was not adept at expressing himself contributed to this image though the MSM was in adoration with the appearance of sophistication before that, but W certainly served to give them fodder on this point.

***Liberalism = Genius?

by L. Brent Bozell IIINovember 26, 2008

If there is a dreadfully overused word in the giddy countdown to the Obama inauguration, it is “smart.” Not just “smart,” but also its stronger cousins like “Brilliant” and “Genius.” These words have been offered shamelessly for nearly every person assigned a role by President-Elect Obama. They are assembling an “all-star cabinet.” This was not an honor for those having attended all the right schools, but a tribute to people who have all the “right” ideas. Liberals are smart because they’re liberals. Conservative beliefs are honed from having been dropped on your head as an infant.

Last week, Newsweek almost comedically compared Obama to Lincoln, hailing the strength of his “humility.” How could anyone stay humble with all these hyper-flattering cover stories about whether you’re Lincoln or you’re Franklin Roosevelt? Nobody asked: But what if he turns out to be another ineffective Jimmy Carter? Then again, not to worry. Just as Time turned Obama into FDR on its cover, they comically projected Carter as Gary Cooper in “High Noon” in the hostage-crisis spring of 1980.

Back in June of 2001, Newsweek headlined an article on an upcoming Bush foreign policy trip with these words: “See George. See George Learn Foreign Policy.” He was painted like a president who couldn’t prove he was smarter than a fifth-grader on TV. Newsweek did attempt a historical comparison. European pols heard Bush advocating missile defense, and one participant joked, “He was like Reagan....without the charisma.” Newsweek concluded school wasn’t working yet for Bush: “Still a student in a most demanding and unforgiving school, he needs all the teachers he can get.”

That dismissive attitude toward Republican politicians will long outlive the Bush presidency, just as it outlasted Reagan’s. Nine days after the election, Newsweek editor Jon Meacham denounced Sarah Palin in the snobbiest of tones on NBC’s “Today” as someone who should “be going into a kind of policy Berlitz course, which one would think would be a relatively sound thing to do.” Plugging Meacham’s biography of Andrew Jackson, NBC’s Matt Lauer added the colorful tale that Jackson threatened to kill his own vice president, so Meacham caustically added, “I don’t know if Senator McCain has thought that along the way.”

Meanwhile, Newsweek’s writers are exploring the inspiring depths of humility of their blessed Barack: “Obama has unusual detachment for a politician. He observes himself as a kind of figure out of literature.” Does that sound humble? Or does it sound astoundingly arrogant? Reagan living in his own movies put him in Fantasy Land, but Obama seeing himself as the Embodiment of Hope on the library shelf is somehow grounded. The Obama-crazed media are hallucinating.

On ABC’s “Good Morning America,” co-host Robin Roberts couldn’t stop gushing about the Obama cabinet picks: “Some would say it’s a team of rivals, a la President Lincoln, or is a better comparison a team of geniuses as FDR did?” George Stephanopoulos unsurprisingly agreed: “We have not seen this kind of combination of star power and brain power and political muscle this early in a cabinet in our lifetimes.”

Smelling salts all around, please.

If this proposed incoming Obama administration wasn’t so stuffed with Clintonites, starting with Hillary, that line might have sounded insulting to Bill Clinton. Sixteen years ago, all these same tributes were being offered to Bill Clinton’s superior intelligence, Bill Clinton’s grace under pressure, and a superior incoming Clinton staff. Even Stephanopoulos was ogled back then over the charisma of his “power whisper.”

But looking back, how well did Bill Clinton display a foreign policy genius that made the world a less violent place? Are the mass murders in Rwanda or the massacre in Srebrenica something that every Clinton fan in the media has wiped clean from their brains? Have they all forgotten the Americans killed at the Khobar Towers, or aboard the U.S.S. Cole, our lost diplomats at the embassies of Kenya and Tanzania? Did the overflowing international compassion of Clinton melt the hearts of al-Qaeda into retirement? Why, then, does every media liberal assume that History will open her arms and beckon Obama forward as an early entry into the Pantheon of Presidential Greatness?

Conservatives and Republicans have a very important role to play now in holding this alleged Team of Geniuses accountable. This disgraceful “news” media won’t, period. They will line up to serve Obama only slightly less explicitly than Chris Matthews, who typically blurted out that his new job as a television host was to insure President Obama’s success. We say “blurted out” because Matthews tends to...blurt. But give him credit for one thing: the courage to admit the attitude of servitude that his colleagues so piously deny.***

This is one image the Cans have to dispell. "Dogma" as Colin Powell puts it is not going to do it. We need thoughtful, intellectual responses that will appeal to the growing bed of minorities in the US.